Jul 182024
 

Yup, another week so I wrote another long post about the design pillars we are using for designing Stars Reach. (If you missed last week’s, it’s here, and I expanded on it on the blog here.)

This week, it’s all about the second set:

The Ease of Nintendo Meets the Depth of the Sandbox MMO

  • The game will be deep: a set of proven game mechanics brought together in one universe.
  • Controls and interfaces will be intuitive and simple and familiar.
  • We will support varied clients so that players can play on whatever device they choose.

I go into details on each of those over in the article on the Stars Reach website.

Something that I meant to dig into in that article, but totally forgot to, is that all this talk of forms of accessibility really needs to include a factor that has hugely affected the development of MMOs over the years: the time commitment.

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 Comments Off on SR Pillars Part 2: Easy Surface, Much Depth
Jul 102024
 

I have written a blog post about the core pillars of Stars Reach over on the SR website.

We have three big pillars, each of which decomposes down into a series of goals — three each — and then those provide a host of more specific design rules or guidelines that the game has to follow. It’s core to how we manage a large complex project like this, trying to keep everyone aligned towards the same goals.

It still isn’t always successful. It’s super easy to forget to refer back to them. For a while, we even had the requirement that if you were working on a design document, you had to look up the various design vision statements and paste them in at the top of the doc, in order to force you to have them top of mind.

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